wives." "The dread Eagle is wont to lay corpses in rows, and to feast with
the leader of wolves and with hovering ravens glutted with flesh, butchers
with keen scent of carcases." "Better," closes the song, "better the grave
than the life of man who sighs when the horns call him forth, to the
squares of battle."


[Sidenote: The Welsh hopes]

But even in bardic verse Llewelyn rises high out of the mere mob of
chieftains who live by rapine, and boast as the Hirlas-horn passes from
hand to hand through the hall that "they take and give no quarter."
"Tender-hearted, wise, witty, ingenious," he was "the great Caesar" who was
to gather beneath his sway the broken fragments of the Celtic race.
Mysterious prophecies, the prophecies of Merlin the Wise which floated from
lip to lip and were heard even along the Seine and the Rhine, came home
again to nerve Wales to its last struggle with the stranger. Medrawd and
Arthur, men whispered, would appear once more on earth to fight over again
the fatal battle of Camlan in which the hero-king perished. The last
conqueror of the Celtic race, Cadwallon, still lived to combat for his
people. The supposed verses of Taliesin expressed the undying hope of a
restoration of the Cymry. "In their hands shall be all the land from
Britanny to Man: ... a rumour shall arise that the Germans are moving out
of Britain back again to their fatherland." Gathered up in the strange work
of Geoffry of Monmouth, these predictions had long been making a deep
impression not on Wales only but on its conquerors. It was to meet the
dreams of a yet living Arthur that the grave of the legendary hero-king at
Glastonbury was found and visited by Henry the Second. But neither trick
nor conquest could shake the firm faith of the Celt in the ultimate victory
of his race. "Think you," said Henry to a Welsh chieftain who joined his